Pirate Captain Kidd is hanged in London
On this day · 23 May 1701
The privateer-turned-pirate was sent to the gallows at Execution Dock in 1701 — and the rope broke on the first try.
On May 23, 1701, Captain William Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping, on the bank of the River Thames. He had been convicted weeks earlier at the Old Bailey on one count of murder and five of piracy.
Kidd’s fall was steep. He had sailed with a royal commission to hunt pirates and French shipping; somewhere along the way the hunter became the hunted, and the very backers who had funded him distanced themselves once he was an embarrassment. He insisted to the end that the ships he seized had carried valid French passes.
The first rope snapped, dropping him to the ground alive — so they strung him up a second time.
His tarred body was afterward hung in an iron cage over the Thames at Tilbury Point, left to rot in plain view of passing crews as a warning. Many historians now regard his trial as a rushed and politically convenient affair.
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